Five years before I was born, my father
was stationed in Japan by the US Navy. I arrived soon after he retired and
my parents, with my two older brothers, returned to California. But I grew up
in Northern Idaho where I found myself with a lot of unsupervised
time. You might think it was something of a cultural wasteland, but
I found, far from that, Music, Fine Art, Theater, Dance and
Literature were all practiced in the community to some extent.

It was a good childhood despite a generalized angst from growing up within a
family. My parents did their best to give me strong values; they could only do
better than their own parents, after all. Still they raised four kids who managed to
grow up and are making their lives as they see fit.

I came out a Gay man in college. Since then I've devoted my life to my love
of books, the publishing medium and my artistic expression.

I live in the Pacific Northwest with my husband. We have
a dog.

I started Volpane in Love back in 1999 when first
learning to code HTML. A lot has changed since then, but even
before I began publishing online I self-published several times.
In the Mid-nineteen Nineties, I published two issues of Gae-raj,
an anthology-style "Queer art zine". It was written up in Queer
Zine Explosion #12, back in 1995 and Larry-Bob gave
it a favorable review,

"...it's not a solid block of text like some zines,
but draws you in visually."

I've continued to self-publish visual chapbooks of poetry
and graphic anthologies of short stories created with other
writers using round-
robin story method. You may purchase my poetry chapbook on my poetry page.
Unfortunately other publications are out-of-print indefinitely.

I attempt to post regularly, depending on the subject and my mood. At
Volpane I am posting
pages from my sketchbooks, frequently redesigning them into
t-shirt, hoodie, mug, mouse pad, and tote bag designs available at CafePress.com and Zazzle.com. I started out reposting personal
project material at my Tumblr, but as time goes on
I find I have time only for re-posting things I find on that interface made by other
people.

Also, I have designed web pages for my friends at Pistilbooks.net
and for other friends.

Oddly perhaps, I am often asked by people of Filipino origin where I came by "Volpane in
Love" as a name for my webpage and if I am connected in some way to their family. I
explain this is a smash-up of two literary references, namely the English 1605 Ben Jonson
play whose title character is "Volpone, or 'the Fox'" and the French novella "Swann
in Love", a section from "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. I figured "Volpane" to
be a suitable anglicized version of the Italian word for "fox", only to discover over the
years that it is a Spanish iteration which became a family name, of which several members
reside in the Philippines and can trace their roots back to when Spain colonized the
islands. And indeed, I have no direct family connection.